hackers

The recent "Cyber Storm" war games held by the U.S. government's Homeland Security Department took a turn when participants tried to hack into the computers that were running the exercise. The war game simulated cyberattacks against the U.S. infrastructure over a five day period. But instead of attacking the scenario, some players opted to cheat. "Cyber Storm 2" is scheduled for March.

Read the full AP story on Wired News: "Threats from everywhere in 'Cyber Storm'".

Stockton, California resident John Lawson and his wife Julia began receiving threatening phone calls on Saturday after they were identified as pro-Scientology hackers by a group that is staging a larger attack on the Church of Scientology. The group thought they had caught the hacker who broke into the server that they are using to coordinate attacks against the Church of Scientology for actions to suppress unflattering documents on the Internet. Lawson says the anti-Scientology hackers have the wrong guy and that he barely knows how to use a computer.

Read the full story on the Wired Blog Network: "Anonymous Hackers track saboteur, find and punish the wrong guy" … Read more

In late November 2007, hackers loaded more than 40,000 infected Web pages and thousands of search terms, then used botnets to elevate their search status. This led search results to list the poisoned pages high and even first in some cases. The iinfected sites contained no useful information, however, a click on a link would launch an attack. Although the attack was nefarious, experts still vouch for the safety of search engines--as long as your software is patched and up to date.

Read the full story on Yahoo News: Hackers rig Google to deliver malware .

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The folks over at Make magazine are nutty and brilliant. Witness their open-source gift guide, inspiring for the electronics geek in us all. It's not the guide that's open-source, it's the gifts themselves: They're all hackable, and they're also (largely) on the cheap.

In essence, it's an irresistible gift guide for the serious tinkerer. Make your own LED menorah, modify a teeny Linux computer to your heart's content, or start your four-year-old out on her very own microcontroller board.

Read the fine print at Make: "Open source hardware gift guide"

Files that have been uploaded to hosting sites tend to have a short shelf life, but there are few that manage to keep them around indefinitely. In many cases, users will simply forget about a previously uploaded file, or have no more use for it. To help give these orphaned files a second life is FilesTube, a search engine that monitors files that have recently been uploaded to a handful of file-sharing sites and makes them easily searchable. While the files aren't in any way hosted to FilesTube, the service acts as a middleman to point you to where … Read more

A few weeks ago I had the chance to ask Dave Merkel, vice president of products for Mandiant, a digital forensics company, if there was a point where investigators say "well, that's the best we can do." Apparently a lot of cybercrime cases do hit a brick wall. Merkel said it was a one-in-a-hundred or one-in-two-hundred chance that investigators get the kind of resolution that results in someone's arrest.

"The big challenge is--and this is still true today--there is no Internet equivalent to a local cop or local police agency. You work with actual local … Read more

Windows is hyper-secure. Just ask Microsoft.

But if you ask people outside Redmond, like Beau Butler, who demonstrated a massive hole in Microsoft's Windows security last week, things aren't so rosy, as The Register reports.

Microsoft knows about the flaw and spent the Thanksgiving holiday trying to fix the error, as reported in The Sydney Morning Herald:

The flaw is an old one, first exposed and apparently fixed more than five years ago. But it appears Microsoft's fix was only partially effective. [GASP!]… Read more

McAfee announced plans on Tuesday to acquire ScanAlert in deal worth approximately $51 million in cash.

And what is McAfee looking to get for its money? For starters, it'll snap up ScanAlert's Hacker Safe Web site security certification service, bolster its own SiteAdvisor security-rating system, and become the keeper of ScanAlert's proverbial "good housekeeping" seal for sites seeking to reassure customers that they are conducting safe online transactions.

The acquisition, expected to close in the first quarter, calls for integrating ScanAlert's e-commerce security certification service into McAfee's SiteAdvisor system. McAfee last year acquired SiteAdvisor, … Read more